LOADED AN­DROID

With the Gal­axy Y Pro Duos, Sam­sung has tried to put ev­ery­thing into one de­vice. The phone runs the An­droid op­er­at­ing sys­tem, has a QWERTY key­pad and is a dual SIM de­vice. But does it per­form?

The Gal­axy Y Pro Duos isn’t a gor­geous look­ing de­vice. Hon­estly, it re­sem­bles the other QWERTY phones around. The 2.6-inch screen is about av­er­age—not so bright, nei­ther so dull. The de­vice has a Duos brand­ing above the dis­play and a QWERTY key­board be­low. The touch keys that usu­ally help in con­trol­ling the de­vice have turned into phys­i­cal keys. In be­tween op­tion, home and back, search keys is the op­ti­cal track­pad that helps in scrolling up, down, right and left. The keys on the key­pad are com­fort­able to type with.

While the keys make it easy to op­er­ate this phone, the touch screen feels too small. The ap­pli­ca­tion launch icon

BAG IT OR JUNK IT?

Calls for a buy only if you want a dual-sim phone with a QWERTY key­pad and run­ning on the An­droid OS. that usu­ally ap­pears at the bot­tom has moved to the last right col­umn along with short­cut icons. As these re­main static while ac­cess­ing the apps menu, only 12 icons man­age to fit into each win­dow. Run­ning An­droid v2.3, it has the usual Google ser­vices. The 3.2 MP cam­era at the back cap­tures av­er­age images and so the Gal­axy Y Pro Duos can’t be called a cam­era phone in it­self.

For mu­sic, there is FM ra­dio as well as a mu­sic player and the sound out­put is about good. Users also have the op­tion of down­load­ing apps like Po­laris Of­fice, News & Weather, Sam­sung Email, Sam­sung IM and Task Man­ager from Sam­sung Apps.

These sound like the reg­u­lar fea­tures but it’s the dual SIM slots hid­ing be­low the bat­tery that will at­tract many buy­ers. The phone sup­ports two GSM SIM cards but not on ac­tive mode. This means, when the first SIM is busy on a call, the sec­ond one goes into standby mode and vicev­ersa.